Designing reliable silicone elastomers for high temperature applications

Reliability and durability are strict requirements for silicone elastomers employed in high temperature applications, if long time device performance is desired Improving the thermal stability of silicone elastomers is a major challenge, addressed by both the scientific and the industrial community Nevertheless, traditional methods such as adding heat resistant fillers 1 or chemical modifications 2 still suffer from considerable shortcomings Here, it is demonstrated that the thermal degradation behaviour of silicone elastomers is affected strongly by network reactant stoichiometry 3 Comparative thermal degradation studies were performed on silicone elastomers synthetized with different stoichiometric ratios and thereby different fractions of elastic, dangling, and sol structures (Fig 1).